Can a hard disk over heat?

then turn a computer off?

[rj87uk]

Just wondering if my hard disk is over heating will it then turn off my computer?

[trillianjedi]

A hard disk overheating can cause all manner of problems, including a consequential destruction of your power supply (I speak from personal experience ;-)).

I'm not sure if it would turn it off though, unless you have heat sensors on the motherboard and something in the BIOS set to power down if anything exceeds a certain temp.

Have you looked at your BIOS settings?

TJ

[Macro]

AFAIK, there is no automatic turn-off for hard disks. There is no temperature sensor on hard disks.

That's why it is essential to have a good chassis fan blowing over it. Some 120 mm fans generate about 16 db. That's very low noise and you won't notice it. Add one of those to be on the safe side.

[Lord Majestic]

AFAIK, there is no automatic turn-off for hard disks.

Some newer IDE disks can detect it and slow down spinning, however I would not count on that -- having active cooling is essential, and don't forget about backups on disks from different brands!

[SEOMike]

I administer some computers at construction sites. One computer had around for a while and had it's case fans fail due to running all the time and a dirty environment. The first thing to go was the large high speed HDD. The computer shut down (from a motherboard hi temp failsafe) and when the computer was turned back on, the HDD wouldn't spin up. We replaced it and it's data. I took the drive apart only to find the platters were actually seized in place! Must have gotten pretty darn hot in there!

[vkaryl]

Yah - I've got some bios failsafes that do the same thing unless you deactivate them. Which is NOT a good idea....

[Macro]

Lard Majestic, I've never heard of IDE disks like that. Could you point me to any info? Thanks.

[Lord Majestic]

Lard Majestic, I've never heard of IDE disks like that. Could you point me to any info? Thanks.

The drive is WD Caviar SE 320GB... or so I thought: I stand corrected now that I have re-read the site and realised that they don't throttle rotational speed (a la Intel's SpeedStep), but just as heat efficient as older 5400 rpm drives. Apologies for posting misleading info and thanks for querying me!

[rj87uk]

Ah!

Thank you all for helping me I looked in the bois and it was only the cpu that was set to turn off at a certain temp.

Cleaned it out a little put the base unit off the carpet and onto a shelf seems like it isn’t turning off any more.

ray

[cooldoug]

Always have good cooling, a computer can overheat, and cause failure.

[freeflight2]

under linux smartd / smartctl -a /dev/device can tell you how hot your drive is and a lot of other neat things...